One out, three bids left for DoD EHR

"PwC’s bid will not be advancing further in the bid review process, but we don’t have details on the decisions," a spokesman for PwC told Healthcare IT News today. "DoD will provide PwC a debrief on the decision at a later date."

PwC US Public Sector Managing Partner Scott McIntyre released this statement:

“PwC remains committed to helping support the health and well-being of our troops and their families. We will continue to work closely with the Defense Department in any capacity that serves those goals.”

PwC's team included Medsphere, offering the sole open source EHR in the competition. Medsphere's OpenVista EHR is a commercial version of the Veteran's Administration's open system. Also part of the PwC group was Google, General Dynamics Information Technology and DSS Inc.

The DoD's $11 billion Healthcare Management Systems Modernization Electronic Health Record program would replace and modernize the existing EHR system, which supports more than 9.7 million beneficiaries, including active duty, retirees and their dependents. It serves patients and clinicians in 2,300 locations around the world.

The teams now left in the running for the work are:

IBM and Epic

Computer Sciences Corp., partnered with HP and Allscripts

Cerner, Leidos, Accenture Federal and Intermountain Healthcare

The announcement of the successful bidder is expected this coming June.

Efforts this morning to reach a DoD spokesman and PwC were unsuccessful.

The Center for New American Security tried to influence DoD to go with an open platform.

On Feb.12, the center released its report, "Reforming the Military Health System," pointing to the dire need for change in how we care for military personnel and their families. The report turned a critical eye to DoD's indecision in the past regarding which path to take with respect to providing an EHR for military personnel and veterans.

Report authors called for an open-source EHR system, value-based care and access to their own medical records for soldiers and veterans.

The report also called for an EHR system that is "extensible, flexible and easy to safely modify and upgrade as technology improves and interoperability demands evolve.

"DOD is about to procure another major electronic (health records) system that may not be able to stay current with – or even lead – the state-of-the-art, or work well with parallel systems in the public or private sector," the authors wrote. "We are concerned that a process that chooses a single commercial 'winner', closed and proprietary, will inevitably lead to vendor lock and health data isolation.

"We believe that, like in so many other aspects of our society, DOD could play a leadership role," they concluded. "It could catalyze expectations, model behavior, and deliver measurable outcomes far outside its five walls. Nowhere is this more true, more necessary, and more far-reaching than the modernization of healthcare services."